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How many months of man-hours did Florida police spend searching for little Caylee Anthony back in 2008, while her mother, Casey Anthony, knew exactly where the child's body was?

If you were the victim of a crime in Orlando, Fla., between July and December 2008, you should be enraged that the police couldn't prevent or investigate your crime because they were too busy looking for a missing child whose mother already knew the kid was dead.

It's a zero-sum game with police resources. Cops combing through the woods searching for a missing child are not going to be patrolling your street or arresting suspects.

From repeat domestic violence calls to Los Angeles car chases, hit-and-run drivers and the balloon-boy hoax, worthless louts consume vastly more law enforcement resources than the rest of us. Cops in any town will tell you all the domestic violence calls come from the exact same homes, over and over again.

As long as we're looking for new revenue streams, how about billing these white trash low-lifes for their massive consumption of police resources? The dregs of society need to be assessed a fee for their abuse of government services and thrown in debtors prison in the unlikely event that they can't pay.

As I described in my last book, "Guilty," the leading cause of all social pathologies is single motherhood. One way or another, Casey Anthony's refusal to give up Caylee for adoption was going to cost society -- and cost Caylee.

The statistics are so jaw-dropping that not giving up an illegitimate child for adoption ought to be considered child abuse.

Various studies have shown that children raised by a single mother comprise about 70 percent of juvenile murderers, delinquents, teenaged mothers, drug abusers, dropouts, suicides and runaways. Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer of these social disorders and you will see what liberals' destruction of marriage has wrought.

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A 1990 study by the (liberal) Progressive Policy Institute showed that, after controlling for single motherhood, the difference in black and white crime rates disappeared.

Meanwhile, adopted kids, on average, turn out better than even biological kids raised in two-parent families.

Of course, there aren't a lot of studies of adopted children because they aren't constantly mugging us. They're too busy running Oracle (Larry Ellison), the District of Columbia (Anthony Williams), or fantastic political websites, like "Big Government" (Andrew Breitbart).

One four-year study by the Search Institute in Minnesota found that adopted teenagers had greater empathy, higher self-esteem and more close friends than non-adopted teenagers in public schools, and were also less likely to engage in high-risk behavior, such as stealing and excessive drinking. In all, they scored higher than the control group on 16 indicators of well-being.

They were as strongly attached to their parents as their non-adopted siblings. Indeed, contrary to Hollywood movies portraying adopted kids mystically driven to find their biological parents, the majority of adopted teenagers rarely thought about the fact that they were adopted. (Apple's Steve Jobs has shown little interest in his biological father and corrects people who refer to his "adoptive parents," saying, "They were my parents.")

We could wipe out chronic poverty in America tomorrow -- and the new iPad would be even more awesome, if such a thing were possible! -- if only women would get married before having children or give up their illegitimate kids for adoption.

And yet, between 1979 and 2003, we went from about 600,000 babies being born out of wedlock, with about a quarter of them put up for adoption, to 1.5 million illegitimate births with fewer than 1 percent of them (14,000) given up for adoption. That's why Angelina Jolie and Madonna are constantly having to break up tribal wars to adopt Third World children.

A 2008 study led by Georgia State University economist Benjamin Scafidi conservatively estimated that single mothers cost the U.S. taxpayer $112 billion every year -- in addition to asking the rest of us to keep an eye on their kids while they go clubbing.

We could have had two Iraq wars -- Obama could have "saved or created" half a million stimulus jobs -- at that price.

But in fact, Scafidi underestimated single mothers' burden to society by excluding additional costs of single mothers to poverty programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit.

That makes his estimates very low: Single mothers are six times more likely to be in poverty than married families. More than 80 percent of homeless families are single mothers.

Scafidi's study also did not consider the burden single mothers place on law enforcement because of their higher likelihood to neglect or kill their children.

Eighty-five percent of mothers who kill their children through neglect are single mothers.

The plague of single motherhood isn't an inevitable decay brought on by stupid choices of the underclass. Destroying the family is the active social policy of liberals. They enjoy experimenting with other people's lives and leaving the taxpayer with the bill.

The mainstream media and Hollywood studios are constantly issuing propaganda about the joys and triumphs of single mothers.

Thus, for example, the noted scientific periodical Us Weekly celebrated single motherhood with an article titled "The New Single Moms and How They Do It," which delusionally proclaimed that the "sisters are doing it for themselves."

No, they're not. They're "doing it" at an enormous and unasked-for cost to every man, woman and child in America. They're doing it at incalculable cost to the children themselves, such as helpless, innocent Caylee.

A 2007 New York Times op-ed column about three gold-diggers fighting for custody of Anna Nicole Smith's illegitimate daughter said: "Surely this change is a welcome corrective to the injustice of traditional marriage laws and family values that stigmatized 'bastards' for life."

Except one can't help noticing how many more illegitimate children there are -- and the accompanying child abuse, neglect, suicide, runaways and murders -- now that the stigma is gone.

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